don quixote, eat your heart out

forever fighting windmills...

...sorry. Things had gotten altogether too "texty" around here. Chalk it up to more of me and my apparently infinite amount of slackage.

This break to the visual monotony, brought to you by Telegraph Avenue.

Ladies & gentlemen of la mancha, g'night!

the bold & the biographical

No matter how old I get, I don't think I'll ever get over the rush of excitement that accompanies the first day of school!

Well, ok... so I'm not technically matriculating anywhere, but my 10-week online fiction workshop started today, & I. Am. STOKED!!

First assignment: Submit a bio, 500 words or less. Given that we're immersed in a virtual classroom, it's a logical exercise to foster a sense of community (blah blah educational buzzword blah).

obey omnipresence

I think one of my favorite things about living in DC is the fact that Shepard Fairey's stuff is everywhere, sometimes tucked away on the back of a street sign on a cheap black & white sticker a la Kinkos, sometimes plastered as an urban alley mural, but always there just waiting for someone to stop and take notice.

Don't ask me what's up with the "Art Rat" squirrel in Mickey Mouse ears... Gotta love a mixed metaphor.

And it's not as if I didn't notice his stuff in the other places I've lived—the East Bay is more than a little fond of its Obey Giant stickers—but the comparative volume here is somewhat overwhelming. Kind of like how Berkeley is the only place I've found Trystero muted post-horn tags. I'm sure you can find them in just about every city if you look hard enough, but strongly doubt the frequency is really comparable.



Just finished reading Born Standing Up by Steve Martin yesterday, so this one jumped out at me. It was interesting to hear about the transition from the Summer of Love to the 1970s. Given the atrocities and horror of our first national conflict for the television age, combined with the failure death of Flower Power, is it any wonder that hippies gave way to the "Me" Decade?

But it's nice to see the imagery being appropriated for today's "unwinnable war(s)."

Speaking of appropriate...


After being inundated with depressing headline after depressing headline for so long it feels like the sky was always falling, this got a good laugh out of me—albeit a bittersweet one, but hey, these days I'll take what I can get. And the irony is oh-so-delicious ("no cents," read "sense").

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I hope to one day meet Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson...

...so's I can kick him in the crotch.

this is not a house

Nor is it what Lichtenstein means to me. But that's neither here nor there.

It's strange how we can carry around mental postcards of people we've never known, stranger still how it's impossible to envision them in any other scene. Or fashion. Or skin.

I'm physically incapable of picturing William S. Burroughs as anything other than a withered old raisin of a brilliant junkie who shot his woman dead. Just can't buy the young man pre-William Tell version. Allen Ginsberg exists only as words on a page and a disembodied voice as Jack Kerouac howls drunkenly in the background.

Samuel Beckett is a portrait hung above my favorite table in a pseudo-Irish pub in Berkeley. And the sound of isolating laughter in a darkened London theatre off Picadilly Circus.

David Foster Wallace is his black & white author's photo at the back of Infinite Jest... which I guess is better than the memory of a man whose light was extinguished at the end of a rope.

And Sylvia Plath? Not the broken woman with her head in the oven, not to me. Just quick, clean, cold:

Dirty girl. Thumb stump.

Anyway. Watch "Beat." Good movie.